


The House Of My Enemy

by Primarybufferpanel (ArwenLune)



Series: Ellipse [5]
Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Gen, Redemption, Strategy & Tactics, enemies to uneasy allies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-13 17:12:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14117064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArwenLune/pseuds/Primarybufferpanel
Summary: "You got any sense in you, Wynonna girl," he growled low in her ear, "you make it a good show and keep screaming 'till you ain't got no voice left."





	1. Chapter 1

Wynonna came back to awareness with a spasm of panic, grunting when she smacked into a hard, uneven surface. Everything hurt, and she gasped painfully when she realised she was dangling in the air, held by a rope tied under her arms.

"Oh, God, what the hell—"

Above her was wild laughter — Revenants, no doubt, since the last thing she remembered was getting tackled into the snow by one, Peacemaker knocked out of her hand and into a snowdrift. Even without the memory, it would have been easy enough to figure out what was going on from the shouts of "Boss, BOSS! We got you a gift! Better than a fruit basket!"

They were lowering her down a shaft into darkness. A well? God, the irony of that—no, looked more like some sort of mining shaft. With at the bottom, from the sounds of it—

"Boys! You know how to raise a man's spirits!"

—Bobo del Rey.

Doc had shot him yesterday, four bullets to the torso. Serious enough to take him out, and he hadn't returned to the trailer park as far as she knew. Apparently he'd gone down an old mine. Where they were now dumping her in with him as a gift. The rope around her ribcage was an agony, and her breath came in harsh, shallow pants.

She trashed when she could see the hewn floor nearing, but before she could touch her feet down Bobo'd already yanked her back, cold bare arm around her throat, stealing her air and pulling her off her feet. She heard a knife being drawn and forced air through her constricted throat, screaming in fury and growing panic.

She had wondered if he'd helped her, back when they'd come for Waverly. She'd believed, when he got her out of the mental institution, that he didn't want her dead. Had sat in a car with him and dozed, and she remembered feeling _safe_.

But yesterday he'd been terrifying, barging into the middle of a fight and knocking the breath out of her before she could get a shot in at the Revenants she'd been fighting. From her prone position she'd watch him growl "The heir is _mine_ ," red-eyed and demonic, and snap one of their necks, kicking the other one so hard she'd heard ribs break.

"And I will be taking my _time_ ," he'd added, turning to her, and she'd scrambled back, trying to get to her feet.

Thankfully Doc had turned to them just before Bobo could get to her.

Not that that helped her now. He growled against the back of her head, arm still like a band of steel around her throat, and she froze with panic as she felt the knife slide along her ribs, seeking the right place to slip in.

Then there was a painful tug, and the agonising constriction of the rope fell away, the knot sliced through. The way he'd dragged her backward, she could look straight up, and she caught a glance of the rope being hauled up, of three heads looking down.

"Have fun with that bitch, Boss!" came the shout down.

"Oh, I will!" he answered, voice dropping to a demonic growl, and then, clacking his teeth, low and terrifying by her ear, "now let's have some privacy..."

He dragged her backward into a tunnel, and she clawed at his arm, kicking wildly and screaming with all the breath she had left. The sound of the jeering Revenants followed her.

After what felt like a bunch of twists and turns, further and further away from the light of the shaft, the adrenaline gave out. She became painfully aware that she was bruised and exhausted and cold, her muscles burning and her ribs aching, and that despite all her training, there wasn't anything she could do. She let herself go limp and quiet. Now she noticed his breath was strained. He wasn't recovered from Docs' bullets then, not fully. Maybe later there'd be a chance to—

He halted, shaking her roughly.

"You got any sense in you, Wynonna girl," he growled low in her ear, "you make it a good show and keep screaming 'till you ain't got no voice left."

She was so startled that her hand dropped away from the arm he still had around her throat.

_What?_

He wasn't restricting her breathing anymore, only holding her in place with her back to him as he started moving again, pulling her deeper into the tunnels. She finally shook away her confusion and started screaming again, calling him every name she could think of and a few she made up on the spot, finally just screaming with wordless rage until she was hoarse.

He pulled her into a dimly lit space, guiding her down onto a chair and then releasing her, taking some distance as if he was worried she'd lash out. They were in what might have been a messroom for the miners once, lit by a couple of mining lamps. There were some rickety old tables and chairs, a cot along one wall. She saw jugs of water and a crate with what looked like food.

Bobo took a half-full water jug, drank from it, then offered it to Wynonna. She looked at him warily, panting, her throat aching. What the fuck was going on?

He looked pale, oddly human and vulnerable without his coat. The front of his grimy t-shirt stiff with dried blood from the gunshot wounds. The deep scratches she'd left in his arm barely bled. She remembered how cold his arm had felt. Not 'It's chilly and he must be feeling it' but 'Might recently have been dead and not warmed back up yet' cold. She'd never really thought about how that happened.

He put the jug down on the ground between them and backed away, sitting down on the cot a little harder than he'd perhaps intended. Shrugged into his coat.

They sat looking at each other warily until she finally gave in and took the water, soothing her aching throat a little.

"What the actual flying _fuck_?" she croakily summarised her feelings about the situation.

He huffed in annoyance, theatrical.

"Jesus Christ, what'll it take for you to believe—"

He made a frustrated gesture, grimaced as it apparently pulled on his wounds, and subsided.

"Believe _what?_ "

She'd never seen Bobo roll his eyes before. It made him look unexpectedly human.

"That we're after the same thing!" he burst out. "All this time people've been playing by Clootie's rules, both sides," he continued more softly. "Your grandfather, tryin' to shoot us all. Me, tryin' to get an Earp Heir to walk across the line with me." He sounded exhausted at the memory. "All of us forgetting that the game ain't set up to be won by anybody but Clootie. It ain't designed to end, just to keep us all trapped an' fighting like weasels in a sack."

He shifted back to lean against the wall, seemingly looking for a comfortable position and not finding one. Wynonna made an acknowledging noise.

"You want to help us kill Clootie," she finally said, half question. The adrenaline was fading, and she felt faint and shaky and freezing cold.

He rolled his eyes at her.

"Thought I'd been plenty obvious. Haven't _any_ of you lot seen a long game before?"

Wynonna grimaced a little guiltily.

She'd half denied it to herself when she knew damn well he'd put Peacemaker back into her hand and helped them get Waverly back. He'd retrieved her from the mental hospital when it would have taken the others far longer to find her.

And she had the belated realisation that he'd probably saved her ass yesterday, claiming her as his own to kill, ensuring no Revenant would try. He'd probably have given her a chance to slip away in the chaos of the fight, but Doc had shot him before it could get to that.

"I did— wonder. After you came to get me from the Big City."

"I'd hoped to talk on the way back," he sighed, tossing her a wool blanket. "But you were..."

"Drugged up to the gills?" She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders.

"Didn't know what you'd remember of it. Didn't want it to look like I'd tried to get information outta you."

Oh.

"Dolls would have been willing to talk if there was an opportunity. Give you the benefit of the doubt. Doc, not so much."

"'Course. Trust _John Henry_ to fuck shit up. You ever told _him_ to remember how much he loved Wyatt?"

His face sharpened into a grin when she jolted with recognition. "Ah, you know it now. Was wonderin' when."

"How long have you known it was me, not Waverly?" she asked, because ever since that vision she had wondered if he'd remembered her face well enough over the years to know that Waverly had not grown up to be that woman he'd so briefly met.

"Moment I first saw you when you came back to Purgatory," he huffed an amused breath. "Bargin' into my trailer park with the Deputy Marshall."

She suddenly remember how weirdly familiar he'd acted, as if there was an acquaintance there instead of just a tense awareness of each other's existence.

"So you remembered? That-that's why you're willing to work with me?"

"Problem ain't remembering how much you love an Earp. Problem's that you ain't forgetting how they walk away from you, either"

She winced, because yeah. Perhaps it had been presumptuous to lean on the feelings of a man who'd already sacrificed beyond the call of duty, and been abandoned.

She replayed his words in her head. _They_. First Wyatt, and then, she supposed, Willa. There'd been plenty fucked up about the situation with Willa, plenty Wynonna wasn't comfortable thinking about. But that he'd cared for her, in whatever way his cursed heart was capable of caring, wasn't in doubt.

She remembered how destroyed he'd been when Willa had walked away from him. He'd begged Wynonna to send him back to hell even before Black Badge had turned up.

Maybe after that, maybe after the spellbreaking hadn't worked, he'd remembered that killing Bulshar was the only guaranteed way to break the spell.

They were silent for a while. Wynonna pulled the blanket closer, hiding her hands in its folds to hide her trembling. At some point Bobo leant over with a grunt of pain to dig in the supply crate, pulling out a rawhide bag. He took out a couple of small lumps of something and offered her some.

She was pretty hungry by now, and not wanting to be rude, tried it. Maybe it would make her feel less faint.

_I am made whole in the house of my enemies_

It was pemmican, not half bad. She chewed, unsure why that thought had just come up. _Made whole._ She still wasn't even really sure what it meant. She'd been too busy being crazy to go to Sunday school, even if the Earps would have cared to send her.

"You should eat something hot, to warm up," she said mindlessly, because his hand when she took the food had still felt like ice.

"I'll get the grill goin'," he retorted wryly.

It was quiet for a while as they both ate, and Wynonna felt the shakes fade off, the pemmican making her feel better almost immediately.

"Look, I ain't angling for a dinner invitation," he suddenly said, seemingly apropos of nothing. "Just saying that we all stand a better chance if I can line things up without your people shooting at me."

 _What if that's just—I mean that's what I'd say if I was working for Bulshar_ , she couldn't help thinking. _That's what I'd say if I wanted to fuck somebody over without being shot at._

She wondered if he'd read that thought of her face, because he just sighed, looking exhausted. Then he climbed to his feet with a soft grunt.

"C'mon, I'll get you to town. Little sister will be worried."

 


	2. Chapter 2

"C'mon, I'll get you to town. Little sister will be worried."

"Might not have noticed I'm gone yet," Wynonna grimaced. It had been a rare day off, and she'd been on her own at the homestead with only the plan to come to Shorty's that night. She'd left earlier than planned, thinking to go shopping on the way, and had been distracted by a couple of Revenants seemingly chasing somebody down in a field. For all she knew her car was still there by the side of the road.

He picked up one of the mining lamps and lead her down a tunnel. The air was still and cool here, the tunnels leading into the bedrock. Their footfalls echooed softly, but there was no sound apart from them. It wasn't as creepy as she would have expected, following him deeper into the earth.

She was still puzzling on how to feel about his claim that he was working toward the same thing she was — ending the curse by killing Bulshar. Remembering Robert Svane it didn't seem unlikely, but a lot had happened since then, not the least being Bobo clearly under Bulshar's influence not a month ago. Maybe he wasn't now; saving her, helping her, trying to convince her he was on their side all seemed far more convoluted than the demon's style. But that also didn't mean he couldn't be brought back under that influence.

On the other hand, she wasn't entirely sure what _would_ convince her that he was on their side.

She almost bumped into him when he halted, watched with a shiver as he pulled up an ancient metal railing from the depths so they could get around the side of a vertical shaft, the elevator long since rotted and disappeared into the depths.

"Now I don't know that it needs sayin'," he began, right around the time she began to realise that he wasn't leading her to some exit and a car, that this was going to be a long, long walk through an abandoned mine system. "But if Clootie finds out you're alive—if _any_ of the Revenants find out—then my time is up. I spent the better part of a century making it known that any Earps were mine to kill."

"Right." Her walking away from this, after they'd literally thrown her into his arms, would made it very clear he hadn't wanted her dead.

Well, she supposed _that_ convinced her. Letting her go, if he really was planning to do that, put him more or less at her mercy.

She frowned, replaying what he'd said in her head.

"Wait, are you saying that you kept the Heirs _alive_?"

He gestured for her to halt, turned to a small, unassuming side tunnel, and motioned for her to stay closely against the wall. She watched as he edged into the tunnel, apparently avoiding the ground in the middle, and followed his example.

"I worked with Josiah," he said when they were both past whatever that was. "tryin' to get control of the Revenants so they didn't eat him alive, trying to end the spell. Wyatt had told him about me, so he knew who I was. Mind the tripwire here."

He continued in silence for a while, and she tried to figure out if she was willing to believe him.

"Edwin didn't care for my help," Bobo continued after the next turn in the tunnel. "He just wanted to shoot everybody, but Ward was willing to talk, willing to try something that might work. And you - I'd say you're more likely than any of 'em to actually succeed in breaking the curse. I ain't ever been interested in killing you, Wynonna girl. All it'd do is restart this fucking merry go round and keep me among these assholes that much longer."

She blinked. He'd always seemed so at home in the trailer park, respected and feared among the Revenants. King of that particular hill. It had never occurred to her that he wasn't there by preference. Thinking back on the man he'd been, she could maybe see the path from there to here as a strategy as much, or perhaps even more, as it was moral corruption.

"Wait, you've never wanted to kill me?" she said incredulously. "Asshole, please, you poisoned my entire town and tried to get them to do it for you."

"Oh, well, yeah," he said, shrugging a little. "Guess I did, at that. Your friend killed me yesterday, so I'd call it square."

Wynonna scoffed.

"And don't try to tell me you didn't enjoyed seeing that cretin Champ Hardy like that," he added, a wry little twist to his voice that reminder her that feeling protective of Waverly had involved watching her date Champ, just as it had for her. Huh.

"Don't step on that plank," he pointed, and she diligently avoided it.

"Are you surprised that there are some trust issues on our side? And anyway, it didn't stick, the killing."

"Just 'cause I didn't stay dead don't mean it didn't hurt," he pointed out mildly. She couldn't see much of him in the gloom, only his white hair really, but remembering how grey-pale his skin was, the amount of blood on his shirt, the way his breathing was strained with the activity of walking, and acknowledged that with a nod.

"So why'd you help the widows wake Bulshar?"

He huffed a wry breath, shaking his head as if he couldn't believe her.

"You think I had a choice? Waverly didn't notice I was trying to stay out of their hands?"

"I... guess not?"

"Once they had me.. well, seemed more- _productive_ , to let 'em believe I'm on Clootie's side."

Yeah okay, she could see that. He'd have been cast aside at best, killed more likely, and the Widows would have known how to make it keep hurting even for him.

He guided her across a narrow ledge next to a deep open space, navigating the dark maze with every sign of confidence. She watched him carefully, tried to step only where he stepped.

"You know your way around here," she said, eyes narrowing.

"I ought to," he said under his breath, feeling for something in a dark alcove of the rock wall. "I own the mine."

"What? But this has to be the old Königs mine, isn't it? I thought that'd never been sold." It had been deep and enormous and closed before she'd even been born.

He briefly turned to look at her with his sharp grin, and she frowned. Königs meant 'king' in German, from what she remembered reading. King. Del Rey.

"Holy shit, I thought you meant you bought it when it closed."

"It was something to do," he said absently, yanking hard on a rope that seemed to serve as a handhold for a narrow ledge. Satisfied when it held, he walked across, waiting for her on the other side.

Wynonna froze in the middle of the narrow walkway when a shout echoed up at them from far below. The depth of the shaft they were passing had been abstract until just now, and she swallowed thickly.

"There's somebody down there," she breathed, unable to make herself move. Had somebody stood here and lost balance?

She yelped at the sudden touch on her upper arm, his hand closing around her bicep and pulling her the last few steps off the ledge. He didn't let go until her limbs were willing to move again and she took another step back from the chasm.

"There's somebody down there!" she whispered urgently. Couldn't he hear it? "Man, this is really redzoning my creep-o-meter."

"I've forbidden anybody to take this path. You do it anyway and you fall, I ain't gonna build an elevator to get your ass back up out of an 80 year old mineshaft," he shrugged. "Guy was no great loss anyway."

Wynonna shivered at that callous dismissal. Robert Svane had been a good man, but Bobo del Rey—well, hell and a century amidst Revenants had definitely ground away the kinder side of his character. Then she remembered that while there were Revenants that gave her pause, a lot of them she was more than happy to send to hell. Was being stuck at the bottom of a mine shaft really worse than hell?

"Well, good way to keep others away, I guess," she muttered as they started walking again, trying to block out the eerie far-away voice.

After what felt like hours of walking, he lead the way into a narrow branch of a tunnel that sloped up until it turned into stairs, the ceiling low enough that Bobo had to stoop a little. He stopped a couple of times to touch places in the hacked out walls and ceiling. She didn't know if he was disabling booby traps or just taking a break to catch his laboured breath, so decided not to draw attention to it.

 

Finally, to her surprise, there was a door on the end of it, set a little awkwardly in the only roughly squarish hacked out tunnel. Bobo produced a key from the pocket of his coat and opened it, leading the way into.. she squinted around the dank space. The mine hadn't smelled bad, mostly just that old mineral smell - the air clearly moved, because she'd felt drafts at certain places. In contrast, this space was damp and still and like something'd rotted in here a long time ago. When he raised the lantern, she could see that it was some kind of old cellar.

Bobo went through a door at the end, into what was apparently an old fallout shelter. Up a rickety ladder and through a hacked out hole into a basement that looked less abandoned and more rarely-used. There was another passageway and another cellar, and then at the end of a tunnel there was a hatch set high in the left side of the tunnel.

He climbed a few improvised steps to get at the vertical wooden board. He grunted when it seemed to meet unexpected resistance. Rather than trying to force it, which she suspected would be too aggravating for his wounds, he stepped back down to where she was.

"Got a phone?"

She shook her head, unsure where it had gone to — with a little luck, still in the snow near Peacemaker. God, she hoped those asshole Revenants had been content to get her and hadn't bothered to go back and look for her gun.

Bobo fished a phone from his pocket and tilted his head in thought, then dialed a number from memory. He put the phone on speaker.

"Shorty's," Doc Holliday's unmistakable drawl announced.

"Well _hello_ , John Henry," Bobo grinned, falling in familiar taunting tones that made Wynonna roll her eyes. "If you bring some hot coffee to the basement... I might have a nice—" he snapped his teeth together, " _surprise_ for you."

Holy shit, they were under Shorty's basement? Which was connected to an old mine Bobo had apparently opened and owned — no wonder he'd bought Shorty's.

Doc made a wordless noise of outrage, and before he could launch into a tirade, Wynonna grabbed Bobo's wrist to pull the phone toward herself.

"Do it please, Doc," she managed in a hoarse whisper. "Coffee and some hot food."

"Wy—! Right," Doc answered dubiously

The connection broke, and Wynonna shook her head in disbelief. Doc'd be coming down guns drawn, along with everybody else he could gather.

"You just can't help yourself, can you? Have you ever seen a chain you didn't want to yank?"

"Wyonna girl, I don't think _you_ get to lecture anybody on impulse control," Bobo said with amusement.

 

A few minutes later they heard voices, still distant, and Bobo gestured for Wynonna te get up the steps while he took a couple of steps back down the tunnel, both giving her space and staying out of sight of somebody looking down into the tunnel, unless they stuck their head through the hatch.

She'd been trying to figure out where in the basement this would lead, because she really couldn't remember seeing anything that looked like a door. When she knocked on the inside, after a moment the voices got louder, and then the board was lifted away, revealing Dolls, with Doc and Waverly looking over his shoulder. Both Dolls and Doc had their weapons drawn. Looked like the hatch was in the back of a supply closet.

"Oh, _Christ_ ," Dolls said with palpable relief. "Are you okay?"

"Nicole found your car an hour ago," Waverly said, clutching a cup of coffee and a takeout box.

"Little bruised, my throat hurts, but I'm fine."

Dolls' eyes flicked to the tunnel behind her, and she could read his question well enough. He couldn't see Bobo from this angle, but it was an easy guess that he was present, and Dolls was wondering if he was threatening her.

"Bobo is here, but I think you guys should put your guns away before we go into that, okay?"

"You're sure?" Doc said dubiously.

She heard Bobo snap his teeth behind her to her left.

" _Yes_ ," she said forcefully, raising her middlefinger at Bobo over her shoulder. The last thing she was in the mood for was another pissing contest between Doc and Bobo. Neither of them seemed to be able to help themselves.

When the guns were tucked away she climbed out of the hatch, then stuck her head back in.

"You comin' up?"

"Nah, I'm good here," he said, and she wondered if he didn't want the others to see that he was still recovering from Doc's gunshot wounds. Given that he did kind of resemble death-not-yet-warmed-over, she supposed she could understand it.

"Okay. Waverly, could you pass the-?"

She handed down coffee and food, and he sat down on the bottom step to eat, out of sight from the others except for maybe the top of his head. Wynonna lowered herself to sit on the wooden floor just outside the hatch, figuring she'd need to be the bridge between both sides. Dolls took her cue and settled down on a nearby beer crate, as did Waverly, though reluctantly.

"What the hell happened?" Doc still looked agitated, itching to shoot something or somebody.

"Couple of Revenants baited me out of my car. Made it look like they were hunting somebody. Peacemaker got knocked into a snowdrift when they jumped me."

Waverly pulled out her phone, probably to text Nicole.

"OK. Let's hope they didn't bother to look for it," Dolls said. "We'll go dig."

"'f you don't find it, I will," Bobo said.

Waverly and Doc both bristled.

"You know, Bobo," Dolls said dryly, "it would help if you didn't make everything sound like a threat, because I'm almost sure that was actually an offer of help."

Bobo huffed a chuckle and made a throwaway gesture without looking around, and Dolls almost grinned.

"The Revenants dumped me down a mineshaft as a gift for the boss," Wynonna said with a headtilt to the hatch.

She waited to see if Bobo was inclined to add to the conversation, but he was busy stuffing his mouth with the burger they'd brought for him.

"So we had the opportunity to sit down for a bit of talk, and discovered that we have more in common than I realised. A deep desire to kill Bulshar, for one thing."

"You really want to go all 'enemy of my enemy' with _Bobo_?" Doc said incredulously. 

"Look, the enemy of my enemy is an _asshole_ ," Wynonna said, and Bobo turned his head just enough that she could see his shark's grin. "He's also right that we've been following the rules on a game that was never designed to be won."

"I'm listening," Dolls said evenly, giving Doc a quelling look.

 

With Bobo still eating, Wynonna explained what he'd told her, gave her own view. Even when he was finished with his food he largely stayed quiet, and she wondered if he was deliberately letting her do the convincing. Probably.

"Basically, we have a window of opportunity here," Wynonna finished, seeing that she'd convinced Dolls and Waverly, and that even Doc looked reluctantly accepting. "But it's like, today, maybe tomorrow -- any longer and it's going to be obvious that you guys know I'm not dead."

"All right, you'll help us kill him," Dolls said, eyes on the back of Bobo's head. "Sounds good. How do we kill him?"

Bobo said nothing for a long moment, just heaved he sigh, fur collar rippling. Wynonna wasn't sure by what she could see of his expression if he was relieved or annoyed or resigned.

After a moment he pushed to his feet and turned. Handed up his half-full coffee cup to her. He climbed up to stand so his upper torso showed through the hatch, leaning on his folded arms on the floor just outside it. She handed him back his coffee, not missing that the way he was standing effectively hid both the bloodstains on his shirt and the way he wasn't too steady on his feet. He had more colour in his face though, the food seemed to have helped some.

"Clootie's, uh--" He seemed to find the audience of Dolls, Waverly and Doc together somewhat unnerving, perhaps especially because from his low position, they were looking down on him. "Clootie's obsessed with rings," he continued. "So were his wives. Used 'em for their spells. One of the Widows reclaimed her power by taking back her ring."

"Not-Mercedes, right?" Waverly said, more to Wynonna than to Bobo. Wynonna hadn't seen her spare Bobo more than a glance, so far. Understandable, but still, that might become a problem. "Last we saw her she was wounded, getting more..." she gestured to her forehead with a grimace. "Then suddenly she was all younger and white haired and fancy."

"Yeah," Bobo nodded. "She took his wedding ring back - I guess it bound her to him. Chopped off his hand to get it. Once she had it she seemed to have access to that power."

"And the, uh, wedding," he continued with his eyes on anybody but Waverly, "was delayed because he needed to forge rings first."

Waverly's face was a thundercloud at the memory of being Bulshar's prisoner and, presumably, at Bobo's role in it. Doc growled.

"You think his own power is tied to a ring, too?" Dolls asked, before they could get into it. "That if we can get it off him, we can kill him?"

"Seems likely."

"Well, good thing we have somebody on our side who can move metal, then," Dolls said evenly.

Doc made a noise of outrage, and Waverly startled. By Wynonna's side Bobo had gone very still.

"Okay, so, I've been thinking," Wynonna barged on, not letting the tension draw out any further. "If this--" she gestured at their little circle, "hadn't happened, you guys would assume Bulshar had me, right? So tomorrow morning you go to his gross underground nest and call him out into the open and demand me back."

"He does seem like the sort of sick fuck who'd like the Earp heir for his bride," Doc suggested. "Just to stick it to Wyatt."

"Eww. _Anyway_ ," Wynonna continued, chosing not to dwell on that, "you guys get him outside, and you're there with him--" she nudged Bobo's elbow, and he nodded, eyes on the others. "Could you get the ring off his finger somehow?" she mimicked pulling a ring off her own finger.

He waggled his hand. "Probably not so fast that he wouldn't notice in time to be able to stop me."

"Why don't we take a page out of creepy Not-Mercedes' book and cut off the whole hand?" Waverly suggested brightly, seeming cheered by this idea.

"I'll throw a knife at you," Doc said to Bobo, grudgingly. "You deflect it into his arm. Moment the arm is off, Wynonna steps up to shoot him."

Bobo tilted his head, shrugging a little as if that was fine by him.

Dolls nodded slowly, thinking it through.

"That seems like it'd be workable. A problem I can see is that we have no idea what it'll look like if he becomes human, or if the curse breaks."

"You mean, better shoot him a bunch of times to make sure?" Wynonna said sweetly. "Sure. I can manage that."

"I'll make sure to bring the shotgun," Waverly said, sounding like she was looking forward to it already, and Doc grinned.

"Then there is mind control," Dolls said, dampening the optimism. His eyes were on Bobo. "He got to you before. Or did you come by that white hair naturally?"

Bobo looked away, shoulders drawing up defensively at either the memory or the question.

"Yeah," he finally said on an exhale. "He won't get to me again."

"Why not? What was different then?" Dolls insisted, and Wynonna knew why they needed to know, this was important. She just hadn't been prepared to feel, what... _protective_ of Bobo?

 _What the actual flying fuck_.

But the man next to her, keeping out of her personal space so carefully, was more Robert Svane than the Bobo they knew and loathed, and she understood that he was allowing them to see a part of him he'd kept hidden for the better part of a century.

"Despair," he finally said, looking directly at Dolls, as if he was daring him to continue this line of questioning.

Wynonna saw Dolls get the implications at the same time she did - that he's been desperate, but wasn't anymore. That the idea of working with them, of finally being accepted as an ally, had given him hope.

"All right, so tomorrow..." Dolls moved on.

They discussed a signal so Doc would know when to throw the knife, but Bobo had apparently run out of fucks to give, because he just said that Doc would know it when it happened - that they would all know. Wynonna suspected that his patience had run low along with his ability to stand there and pretend he felt fine.

She wondered if Dolls had seen the same thing, because he wrapped up the conclave after that. Doc and Waverly went back upstairs to the bar, the fiction of their dinner break having gone on long enough. Wynonna would stay down in the basement until after closing time.

"So, in the morning—" Dolls said, as if he couldn't quite believe that by tomorrow afternoon it could all be over. Wynonna couldn't either. She was trying not to think about it. "All providing we actually find Peacemaker, of course."

"Yeah, uh, what if we don't?" Wynonna grimaced. She turned to Bobo. "Can we contact you?"

He scrawled a phone number on a scrap of paper, noting under his breath that it would be a couple hours before he would be back in range, and climbed down into the tunnel.

"Hey," she said, sticking her head back through the hatch before he had the chance to turn away. "Thanks."

He huffed a breath, looking away. Then he turned back to her.

"Don't let _anybody_ go beyond that door without me."

She remembered the plaintive voice deep below, the slow and seemingly strange path they'd taken at times. Suddenly wondered if Rosita had gone into the mine after she'd fled into the basement, or if she'd just hid down here until she could come back up and slip away.

"I won't."

He nodded in acceptance, and his gaze grew intent.

"You've got the element of surprise. When you do show yourself, do it when I can make it count."

He wasn't asking to give him warning or time to get away before she revealed herself, before Bulshar discovered Bobo wasn't on his side, she realised. He was asking her not to spend him when it wouldn't make the crucial difference. She didn't know if Bulshar could actually, for-real-kill him, but she was getting the idea he was willing to risk it as long as the curse was broken.

"I will," she said, as serious as he was.

He nodded, sharp and a little less composed than usual, and as she watched him walk away down the tunnel she decided that if she had any say in it, he wouldn't sacrifice himself a second time for the Earps.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pls feed the writer some feedback? I'd love to know how this is working for you

**Author's Note:**

> Decided to split this into two chapters after all. 
> 
> I'd love to hear what you think!


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